Yesterday a neighbor of mine asked to install OS on her new laptop. She clearly stated that she wants exactly Windows 7 on it. Good sign for Microsoft and Windows 8. 🙂

Okay, so I downloaded official ISO, put it onto DVD and started boot process. And it hangs in random places on “Loading Files”. After the fourth(!) time and some BIOS experiments it finally went to the stage where I could start installation. It’s a pretty descent laptop but it took more than one(!) hour to install OS. After the successful installation – I saw some message about SAM crash and it immediately rebooted. Okay, I’ve booted again and in the device manager I saw 6(sic!) unknown devices among which was WiFi network card. Good old USB stick saved me again.

Okay, went to my Arch and started searching for drivers on Acer website. Surprise-surprise, these were available only for Windows 8! Okay, lets start searching drivers on some external websites. Finally after some research I was able to install official Atheros Wireless driver. Lots of drivers downloaded for the exact device model just didn’t work even though I had a good understanding of the bundled hardware thanks to AIDA64. At last pretty much everything was installed. Except for Intel video driver. It just refused to install. I had to manually follow “Have a disk” procedure otherwise OS considered it’s own driver as the best one and didn’t install anything. And yes, even standard games ran without video acceleration.

And finally we’re there. The whole procedure took around 4(!) hours and I was almost mad at around 2.30am in the midnight.

And you say that it’s a user-friendly OS? Come on! It took around 30 minutes to install Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, drivers are good out of the box and things work pretty well. You don’t need to wonder across some random sites trying to find virus-free drivers for your system. All needed software packages(LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC) are available in the repositories. That’s what I call hassle-free experience. Not this piece of crap from M$.

Dear users, I have a message for you. Please don’t believe all this marketing bullshit from Microsoft. Their OS is not for simple home users. If you need something simple, virus-free for browsing, viewing multimedia, reading emails – just use Ubuntu or some other Linux distro of your choice.

Dear Acer, is there any reason why you put this weird Linpus Linux distro? Why wouldn’t you go with the normal Ubuntu LTS releases? It would be some much easier for your users?